Kevin Muldoon is a Scottish webmaster and blogger who currently lives in South America. His labour of love is WordPress Mods; a blog which focuses on WordPress Themes, Plugins, Tutorials, News, Modifications.

WordPress has a fairly straightforward registration system. To register, you only need to submit a user name and your email address. A password is then emailed to you and you can log in. This registration process can actually be made quicker by enabling visitors to sign up and log in using social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

A few months ago, in the comments area of my article “How to Integrate Facebook, Twitter and Google+ in WordPress,” a Smashing Magazine reader asked how this could be achieved. I am pleased to look at this issue for you all today. We’ll look at three WordPress plugin solutions that let you quickly add social-media registration functionality to your website, and we’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The admin area is the heart of any WordPress-powered website. It’s where everything is controlled and where admin, editors, authors and contributors publish content to posts, pages and other custom post types. The default features of WordPress are fine for some website owners, although you may find that certain features need to be improved and others need to be added.

Thankfully, the core features of WordPress can easily be extended with plugins. Plugins enable you to extend only the areas you need. For example, if you have a basic blog with five authors, you might only be interested in plugins that improve your editorial process and speed up the process of articles being written, reviewed and published. Likewise, if your website allows registration, you may want to add a plugin that lets you specify what users can and cannot do.

After search engine traffic, visitors from social media services are the second biggest source of traffic. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have established themselves as the mostly used social sharing websites though Digg, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn are not far behind.

Whilst great articles will always be shared by visitors, how well social media is integrated into your website plays a big part in how much social media traffic you receive. Today I will be looking at some of the best social media plugins for WordPress. These plugins help you promote your social media profiles and encourage your visitors to share your content with their friends and followers.

Integrating social media services in your website design is vital if you want to make it easy for readers to share your content. While some users are happy with the social media buttons that come built into their design template, the majority of WordPress users install a plugin to automatically embed sharing links on their pages. Many of you will find that a plugin does exactly what you need; others not so much.

Some are poorly coded, and most include services that you just don’t need. And while some great social media plugins are out there, they don’t integrate with every WordPress design. If you aren’t comfortable editing your WordPress templates, a plugin is probably the best solution. If you are comfortable making a few edits to your theme, then consider manually integrating social media so that you have more control over what services appear on your website.

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